Chicago's streetlights are monitoring its citizens

Chicago wants to become the first city to swallow up
big data in a more permanent and effectual way -- and it's starting
by having lamp posts track its citizens.

The Chicago Tribune has revealed that through Array Of
Things, theUrban Centre for
Computation and Data and the city of Chicago will cover lamp
posts on main thoroughfare Michigan Avenue with sensors that pick
up environmental data, but also smartphone activity. The idea is to
help city planners respond better to environmental issues, but also
to help them dissipate foot traffic in urban hubs. The first
installations are due to take place in July, but in the coming
years the plan is to have hundreds covering the whole city.

"Our intention is to understand cities better,"
Charlie Catlett, a computer scientist at director of Urban
Centre for Computation and Data, told the Chicago Tribune. "Part of the goal is to make these things
essentially a public utility."

In order for that to happen the system obviously has
to not only be proven to be useful to planners, but it also needs
to gain the trust of citizens. It sounds, however, like Google
collects far more data on people than this system ever will.
Catlett explains that the sensors will not save any mobile address
data and will only count devices nearby. The system is designed to
be anonymous, and all that data will be immediately published so
that academics or private institutions can make use of it.

A donation of $1 million-worth of support from
engineers from Cisco, Intel, Qualcomm and others has helped refine
it. Having industry involved might flag up warning signals for
anyone concerned about privacy. After all, even though the system
is not filming the public, the sheer amount of peripheral data
being captured could surely be used to identify someone. City
cameras could also be synched up with this data stream if someone
had the access. But of course accepting industry into this game is
key to its survival. If we want to improve city services, the
suppliers or those that benefit will need to foot the
bill.

It's not the first time a streetlight has been used
as inspiration for public stalking. This year Shadowing,
a system that uses infrared tracking to trigger projections on the
pavement, won the 2014 Playable City award. The idea is it records
shadows left by a passerby, and plays that back to the next person
that walks past. In a world where our data trail is everywhere,
it's a physical reminder of what others are leaving behind without
knowing. With the Chicago project, at least the end point of the
system is somewhat known to the public: it's designed with the
intention of making city life more comfortable.